1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data processing method that executes data processing on an object basis while storing on an object basis information concerning states of execution of the objects. The invention also relates to a recording medium containing an operating system that implements the processing method and to a data apparatus having the recording medium. Details of certain features of the present invention are described in European Patent Application No. 0,753,811 A1 entitled "Data processing method and device" and filed by the same assignee on Jul. 12, 1996 claiming a Convention Priority on JP 178625/95, filed Jul. 14, 1997, the complete disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing architectures apply object orientation to modularize the operating system configuration elements as objects. Such an operating system in which configuration elements are thus modularized as objects is called an object-oriented operating system. An object-oriented operating system allows its system operation to be defined by a series of execution control-switches. This switching is called context-switching.
Execution performance of an operating system heavily relies on the number of context-switches. For example, for implementing the same processing, a program needing a higher number of context-switches requires a longer processing time than a program needing a lower number of context-switches.
Incidentally, either an operating system or application program that runs on the operating system consists of objects. The individual objects have an execution mechanism. The operating system having objects with substantially the same execution mechanism as for the application program objects is called a pure object-oriented operating system. When one object requests a service from another object, the two are respectively called a service requester and a service provider. When a service requester issues a request to the service provider, context-switching is performed from the service requester to the service provider, then the service provider offers a service to the service requester.
In the above processing, if the relationship between the service requester and the service provider is defined for all the objects on the operating system, operation of the pure object-oriented operating system is defined through a series of context-switches between the service requester and the service provider. This allows the central part (i.e. the part that cannot be defined as an object) of the operating system to exclusively perform context-switching. This minimizes the central part of operating system to realize a system configuration that is flexible for the user and the hardware requirements.
However, allowing the central part of operating system to exclusively perform context-switching increases the number of context-switches and thus causes a problem of lowering the performance of the operating system.